Thursday, June 20, 2013

Life in the Library Lane

Question: Hi, guys, great work on everything! You guy really have inspired me to do my own revamp of the pantheons and I was wondering if you guys had any books and source material you could recommend.

Hey, thanks! We love doing this stuff and we think it's awesome when other people love doing it, too. Go out and make neat stuff!

Source material's hard, not because it's hard to give you recommendations but because it's such a huge question - there are literal tons of books and resources out there that are fun to read and informative for Scion!

To start with, if you're revamping pantheons, we recommend picking one and working on it first rather than trying to overhaul every pantheon all at once. It's hard enough to get all the crazy awesomeness of a single pantheon in your brain at the same time, let alone twelve of them. We usually look at somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty to thirty books, online articles or other resources when working on a pantheon, and there are plenty others we don't end up using, so it's kinda impossible to give you those lists for every pantheon you might want to hit up... but our advice is to start with one you're passionate about and go to your local libraries to get some goodness. Look up books on the pantheon, its individual gods or the religions that worshiped them; use the internet to find articles (with good sourcing!) on the same; ask a librarian what other resources might be available to you, in case your library has access to periodicals, online databases or other awesome stuff you might not be able to get at home. Go bananas. We certainly do.

As a close runner-up, you can never go wrong reading the original myths and stories of the gods (and as a bonus, they're usually more fun than some scholar expounding on the ritual use of bone fragments or whatever!). Luckily, most of these myths are ancient and in the free public domain, so you can get access to them with an internet connection almost instantly. Sacred Texts is a great starting source if you want to go read some free translations of the Eddas, Cattle Raids, Hindu epics or any other set of original myths, and a little Googling around will probably get you loads of other sources around the 'net. Be wary of accidents - you probably don't want to mistakenly pick up someone's original fiction thinking it's ancient myth - but there's plenty out there in the ether if you're diligent about looking.

Other than that, the best advice is just to have fun. Figure out what kind of images, ideas or feeling you want when working on your pantheon and find all the neat stuff out there that fits into it. Make art, write stories, build up your gameworld and have a blast.

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